CONFERENCE REPORTS

Vol.32 No.4 November 1998
ACM SIGGRAPH

Jules BloomenthalUnchained Geometry

November 98 Columns

Conference Reports

Implicit Surfaces ‘98

Implicit Surfaces ‘98, The Third International Workshop on Implicit Surfaces, was held in Seattle on June 15 and 16, 1998 (a reception was held the evening of June 14). The location and time were convenient to those also attending Graphics Interface ‘98, held in Vancouver, Canada from June 18-20.

Dietmar Saupe (University of Freiburg) and Jules Bloomenthal (Unchained Geometry) co-chaired the workshop; Saupe assumed primary responsibility for the editing and printing of the workshop proceedings, and Bloomenthal assumed primary responsibility for local arrangements.

As with IS’96 (the second implicit surfaces workshop in Eindhoven, Netherlands), IS’98 was jointly sponsored by Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH. The workshop is only the second such co-sponsored workshop (the other is the graphics hardware workshop) and thus fosters continued Eurographics/ACM cooperation.

IS’98 received donations from ActiveGrafix, Microsoft, SoftImage and Unchained Geometry; these donations allowed the workshop to provide a professional atmosphere while maintaining low registration fees, especially for students.

The workshop met in the high-ceilinged Walker Ames room, within Kane Hall, on the campus of the University of Washington. The university had recently held its graduation ceremonies and so the campus was lightly populated. The first day was overcast (with a downpour timed for our walk to lunch), but the weather cleared and we were graced with blue skies and rainbows during the evening banquet, which was held aboard a boat that cruised Lake Washington and Lake Union. Saupe and Bloomenthal broke the “long-standing” tradition of personally serenading the attendees during the banquet; however, a brief recital was given Monday by a university student at the small pipe organ in the Walker Ames room.

Eighteen papers were presented, nine each day. Jim Blinn of Microsoft Research presented an invited talk on the first day and Jerry Tessendorf of Cinesite Productions presented an invited talk on the second day. At the close of the second day, past and present workshop chairs met to recommend certain papers for submission to the Computer Graphics Forum and to the Visual Computer, and to choose chairs for the next workshop.

The copyright of articles and images printed remains with the author unless otherwise indicated.

More than 40 persons attended from nine countries and four continents. IS’98 provided, as in past IS workshops, an intimate forum for the exchange of new results in implicit surface research and applications. The presentations, representing work from 19 research centers in eight countries, were divided into sessions on representation, rendering, polygonization, modeling and texturing.

Documentation of the IS’98 workshop can be found at the implicit site, http://implicit.eecs.wsu.edu; this site also serves as a repository for implicit surface research and contains (in .pdf format) the workshop proceedings (available in hardcopy from Eurographics).

Implicit Surfaces ‘98 thanks Dieter Fellner of Eurographics and Chuck Hansen of SIGGRAPH for coordinating the sponsorship of IS’98, and the distinguished IS’98 program committee for its work in reviewing submitted papers.

Implicit Surfaces ‘99 will be held in October, in Bordeaux, France. Co-chairs are Christophe Schlick (University of Bordeaux) and John Hughes (Brown University). For more information on IS’99 as it becomes available, see http://implicit.eecs.wsu.edu/.